Thoughts While Weeding
Damn the Drudgery: weeding mindset and the ways we deal with life's inescapable drudgery.
My mother loves to garden. When I stop by in the summer to visit, she’ll press a glass of wine in my hand and take me right outside to see the reddening tomatoes, gorgeous flowers the size of my head, pumpkin vines winding over and through the stone path that she recently dug up and moved six inches to the right. Now that my dad is retired, he gets in on the action and they come up with all sorts of schemes to add irrigation or build a little footbridge. Their favorite dates involve going to the mountains to smuggle home rocks that they can add to their dividing wall or discovering new garden shops and picking out birdbaths together. They have a pair of hummingbirds they’ve named “Brownie” and “Greenie” who live in the yard and buzz around the hops trellis and Russian Sage.
My parents don’t mind weeding. Their overall enjoyment of their garden far outweighs the burden of the regular upkeep, and they do the job of weeding mindlessly while in the mindset of enjoying their garden.
I do not like gardening. In my backyard, about 10 minutes from theirs, I have let whole sections of the yard be completely taken over by very prickly, very pokey weeds. By August, it’s an embarrassment and every spring I pledge to do better. But summer is busy between kids, camps, full-time work—every year the last few weeks of May and early June swamp me, and by the time I get outside to put eyes on the garden, it’s completely overrun and hopeless.
Then a series of interesting things happen inside my brain and mindset. The cycle of resistance to drudgery. Let’s call it CORD for short.
I feel victimized: I had every intention of doing this, and it is deeply unfair that between work and the damn schools and all our activities, I can’t execute on my vision.
I question the system: why have we created these private parks in the suburbs that need constant upkeep? Why can’t we have a communal living situation where each person brings their best skills to the group?
I blame my family: they are so lazy and preoccupied with themselves that they didn’t even see the weeds growing. Jerks.
I envision an escape: could we sell the house and move to a condo? Like, NOW?
I give up: nature has won. I have lost. I won’t use the yard. I won’t have a garden. I don’t get to have nice things.
As I was finally outside weeding today (see picture below for the horrendous, gruesome details), I thought about these changes in my mindset and how they are related to tasks or processes that I define as drudgery.
Drudgery shows up at work with reports that I need to provide and emails I need to return. It shows up with my kids when gems of important information are buried in long-winded newsletters from the school or paperwork that I need to fill out for camps. It shows up in my relationships in texts that I need to return and plans that I need to make. Drudgery is inexorably woven into every part of my life.
And as my hands were getting poked through two sets of gardening gloves today, I let my mind wrap around this reality. First, I thought damn the drudgery. I refuse. Then, I thought—I am a big, strong woman. Other people seem to trust that I have my shit together, more or less. How do I tackle drudgery so that I can get to the good stuff? I yanked a weed and a clump of roots popped out. So satisfying.
Here’s what I’m thinking.
There are three main ways we can approach drudgery.
Get out of it. Outsource, avoid, ignore, outsmart, reject.
Get through it. White knuckle, distract yourself, pull up your big kid pants, innovate, power through.
Get into it. Learn more about it, discover what’s charming, find pleasure and delight, and lean into the task so it becomes something other than drudgery. Activate that alchemy of passion.
All can be equally efficient and have good results. All can improve your quality of life. But staying in that resistance mindset—the CORD cycle—is almost always limiting and painful.
I’m going to finish weeding. Then it’s on to school forms. Then I’ll think a little more about this.
